Showing on page 25 for url keyword/ brand, is it a penalty?
-
Hi
I have a site which shows on page 25 in G serps for the main brand keyword which is also the url its a .com and as far as I can see has no penalties and has unique content. The keyword itself has no competition and the site should be no1 in G for it. Our site domain is 11 years old.
-
George
Thank you for your insight and you are right its a tough decision which needs to be made before we move forward. I will research it a bit more over the weekend and make a decision on Monday.
All the best and have a great weeekend.
Karl
-
Sites that have algorithmic or manual penalties can still have sitelinks. I have no idea if your site has a penalty or not, I'm just saying there's a real risk from looking at your backlink profile that you may have an algorithmic penalty now, or will get one (or manual penalty) in future. It depends on a number of factors, including the accuracy of your disavow.
If you're starting to rank well for competitive keywords, then that would be a case for staying put. Your visibility is yet to update in SearchMetrics, which is still low though obviously jumped when you launched the new site.
If you moved to the .net, you would have to give up on the .com, as redirects from it would pass the toxic link equity to your new domain. In a worst case scenario, if you stuck with the .com and build lots of quality content, got links and promoted the brand, then your bad link past caught up with you then it would be very difficult to cut free and move to a new domain.
That said, if you moved to .net now there's equally no guarantee that this is completely necessary (as you said you're starting to rank). You're clearly aware that It's a huge decision to make and not one that you would want to take lightly.
Since you're at the point where you're just setting up a new site and probably about to pump money into marketing it pays to be aware of the options. I don't have enough information to say which one you should take.
Hope that helps,
George
-
Thanks George these are all very real risks however, we are starting to rank for some tough highly competitive keywords which puzzles me because if we had a penalty surely it would be sitewide rather than specific terms. Also I noticed than if you search our domain moneysite.com on google we have sitelinks, which I am not sure you would have if a penalty was imposed.
We could go with .net which we own however, could we 301 redirect .com to the .net or would that cause issues for the .net.
-
Hi again,
The horse may have bolted on this particular issue, but here's what I would have done in your position:
If there's no existing traffic to the domain that you want to keep, and the .com isn't critical to the branding (it's not in your logo) then personally I would have put the site on a another domain that you own already (e.g. moneysite.net - assuming that is clean) and just killed the .com.
Having fought through a few Penguin penalties for existing brands, I can't imagine anything worse than launching a new site/brand that has someone else's dirty link laundry attached to it. There's still a chance you might get a manual penalty in future which will hang over like an axe.
It really depends on how much resource you have to start building real quality content that gets links and shares, and keep ontop of your disavows and potentially ongoing link removals.
It also depends on how critical organic traffic is to your business. If you have $50K a month to throw at PPC or affiliates then it may not matter.
George
-
Hi George
We have analysed all backlinks and disavowed a ton of toxic links that the previous owners created. We did evaluate the domain before the purchase however, we did not have access to the previous owners webmaster tools to see if a manual penalty was imposed at that time.
-
Your site appears to be indexed OK, but your visibility is low. I checked that "money site" is a low competition keyword you should be ranking better for.
Taking a look at your backlink profile (opensiteexplorer.org), it appears that there are a ton of toxic links pointing to the domain. This is almost certainly going to affect your rankings through Google Penguin, unless someone's already gone through a stringent disavow process.
Before you launched a new site on this domain, was it vetted to see if your predecessors had done any link building badness?
George
-
Hi George
Thanks for the response.
Although the domain is 11 years old has only recently gone live so we cannot judge analytics data. There are no manual penalties that I can see in GWT however, we only acquired the domain in January 2014.
-
Hi,
You'll need to provide the site details if you need help in diagnosing a penalty.
As a starting point I would log into Google Webmaster Tools to see if a manual penalty has been applied, I would also look in Analytics to see if your organic traffic overall has dropped across other pages on your website.
An algorithmic penalty is harder to diagnose, but can usually be recognised by aligning traffic drops with dates of Google algorithm releases.
George
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Keyword in URL - SEO impact
Hi, We don't have most important keyword of our industry in our domain or sub-domain. How important it is to have keyword in website URL? Most of our competitors pages with "keyword" urls been listing in SERP. What is back-links role in this scenarion? And which URL have more advantage? keyword in sub-domain or page with keyword. Like for "seo" keyword..... seo.example.com or example.com/seo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Why is /home used in this company's home URL?
Just working with a company that has chosen a home URL with /home latched on - very strange indeed - has anybody else comes across this kind of homepage URL "decision" in the past? I can't see why on earth anybody would do this! Perhaps simply a logic-defying decision?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Same URLS different CMS and server set up. Page Authority now 1
We have moved a clients website over to a new CMS and onto a new server. The Domain and URLs on the main pages of the website are exactly the same so we did not do any 301 re directs. The overall Domain Authority of the site and the Page Authority of the Homepage, while having dropped a bit seem OK. However all the other pages now have a Pagerank of 1 I'm not exactly sure what the IT guys have done but there was some re routing on the server level applied. The move happened around the end of December 2014 And yes traffic has dropped significantly Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daracreative0 -
301 Redirect / Canonical loop on home page?
Hi there, My client just launched a new site and the CMS requires that the home page goes to a subfolder - clientsite.com/store. Currently there is a redirect in place such that clientsite.com -> clientsite.com/store. However, I want clientsite.com to be the canonical version of the URL. What should I do in this case, given that there is now a loop between the redirected page and the canonical page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Show Decorative Details or Consolidate Pages with Attributes
This is a site with handcrafted home décor products. Is it better seo to have 1 product for each spoon style and use attributes to show the display options? The decorative display details are important. How do you deal with the important details of the display options? One set of products is measuring spoon sets. For each spoon there are 4 different display options: wood or pewter and hang on a tall post or hang on a wide wall hanger. And there are 8 different spoon styles. The pewter displays have design details matched to the spoon style. (eg. the fish spoon has fishes on it's hanger, the fleur de lys has fleur de lys on it) So the attributes do not change the product itself but instead change the look of how they are displayed. At present each display option/ spoon style is shown as a separate item. That makes 32 different products on the category page. What do you feel is the best way to deal with showing style details and consolidating pages for better seo? Best wishes from Vermont Handcrafter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stephenfishman0 -
301 redirect w/ dynamic pages to static
I am trying to redirect old dynamically created pages to a new static one (single page). However, when I implement the redirects, it still uses part of the old dynamic url. For instance... dynamic.php?var=example1 dynamic.php?var=example2 dynamic.php?var=example3 should all redirect to: static.html. However, they are redirecting to: static.html?var=example1 static.html?var=example2 static.html?var=example3 The page is resolving fine, but I don't want google to misinterpret the new static page as numerous page with dup content. I tried this in PHP on the dynamic.php page as follows, but it the problem above persisted: header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude
header('Location: http://www.mysite.com/static.html'); I tried doing it in my .htaccess file as follows, but the problem persisted: redirect 301 /info/tool_stimulus.php?var=example1 http://www.mysite.com/static.html
redirect 301 /dynamic.php?var=example2 http://www.mysite.com/static.html Can anyone solve this in PHP or w/ htaccess? Help!!! 🙂0 -
Using abbreviations in URL - Matching Keyword
We have a website that uses /us/, /ca/, /va/, etc for URLs of the different U.S. states. How much better is it (or is it at all better) to use /california/ or /virginia/ instead in our URLs to rank for searches that include the name of those states?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Heydarian0 -
Is the Penguin algorithmic penalty on a page basis or a site basis?
Just wondering if there has been any clarification of whether the Penguin algorithmic penalty is on a Page basis or a Site basis? In other words, is it all or nothing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | darkgreenguy0